Cold case puts heat under the BBC

Paul Kalina

HERE'S a sign of just how under siege the BBC is in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal: the broadcast of an episode of its entertaining police procedural show New Tricks was postponed.

Watching the episode, which airs on Friday night, it's not immediately apparent why it would be deemed too sensitive or, indeed, how this goofy ensemble piece about a group of superannuated former coppers tasked with solving cold cases could land itself in anything more controversial than tasteless jokes about long-in-the-tooth playboy Dennis Waterman.

The broadcast of Friday's episode of New Tricks was postponed in the wake of the Jimmy Savile investigation.

Dispatched to Glasgow under the ruse of helping police establish their own Unsolved Crime and Open Case squad, Steve (Denis Lawson) and Gerry (Dennis Waterman) find themselves trading England versus Scotland barbs and investigating the 1993 murder of a wealthy bookmaker, James Soutar.

But here's where things get interesting (and the point at which some readers might want to resume after watching the episode).

Like Savile, the fictional Soutar was a self-made man and confirmed bachelor who left a large amount of cash to a 16-year-old girl in state care upon his death. According to rumours that have circulated since his death, his murder was a result of his sordid private life.

There's the cryptic similarity between the names of James Soutar and Jimmy Savile, whose father, incidentally, was a bookie, while one of the breakthroughs in the unfolding investigation hinges on those who were intimate with Soutar, calling him ''Jimmy''.

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But the strongest clue that writer Roy Mitchell may have intended to obliquely comment on the Savile case emerges in Soutar's keen involvement in charitable causes, mostly involving vulnerable children in state care, and a conspiracy in which senior public officials with seemingly impeccable credentials covered their tracks.

True, New Tricks isn't the kind of show that trades in true crimes or ripped-from-the-headlines scandals. If anything, it's the kind of show that attracts an older audience - an astonishingly large one at that, regularly eclipsing the magic 1 million mark on a night when viewers are treated poorly by the commercial networks - that is drawn to quaint, character-driven dramas rather than visceral, forensic-based whodunits.

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Indeed, the cold cases served up in each episode of New Tricks aren't really what the show is about. Invariably the death will have been suspicious but odd, and the investigation will encounter its fair share of red herrings, unreliable witnesses and nasty villains before being solved.

While it never shies away from depicting humanity's dark side or crime's innocent victims, it's the ageing coppers, their jaded morality and their humane reactions to the situations they are presented with that give New Tricks its pulse.

Nine seasons down the track, however, there are signs of wear. James Bolam, who played the razor-sharp though melancholic Jack Halford, left the show at the beginning of this season, complaining in the process that the show had gone stale. Amanda Redman and Alun Armstrong have also announced their intentions to leave at the end of the next season, which almost certainly spells the show's final curtain.

Detective Inspector Steve McAndrew arrived at the start of this season to fill Halford's gap. This week's Glasgow-set episode is also an opportunity to delve into his touching backstory. Like the other world-weary, once-retired coppers in the unit, the tough, thick-skinned investigator has a soft, sentimental inside.

When we first met the members of the UCOS unit all those years ago they were spirited rebels, the equivalent of the brilliant but disruptive kids in the back of the classroom. They wilfully bent the rules of their superiors, were a thorn in the sides of bureaucrats obsessed with efficiencies and paperwork rather than old-fashioned police legwork, and never wasted an opportunity to remind them, and us, of entrenched prejudices towards ''older'' people.

Nine years later, that triumphant sensibility has been eroded. Having proved that their unusual methods can crack the toughest cold cases, and that George Bernard Shaw was correct when he wrote that youth was wasted on the young, much of New Tricks these days is rote sleuthing.

Still, by any measure, 10 years as one of the ABC's and BBC's most popular shows is a remarkable achievement. For old dogs, they've earned and enjoyed their fair share of tricks.